The setting is a dull suburb in London, just after the middle of the nineteenth century. The hero spots a very pretty young lady in church, and falls in love with her. The first problem is to get an introduction. He manages this, but the girl's mother, with an eye to the long-term, knows that our hero is not well-off, while others, who we can see are not the sort of person the girl would like to marry, are. Various parties and expeditions involving the church's congregation take place, and eventually the wooing of the young lady appears successful.

The book is altogether in a different style to Hutcheson's later works, which are mostly nautical. Possibly a period of twenty years separates this book from the later ones. Certainly this book has about it, at times, a feeling of the experimental, particularly in the use of certain words, which one feels Hutcheson may have thought up, and which have not "caught on." Another symptom is the use of unusual hyphenated words, and an over-use of common ones. There are also several quotations from poetry, which one does not mind while they are in English, or perhaps French, but which get a bit tedious when they are in other languages. I particularly dislike this habit when one of these foreign poems is used at the start of the chapter. Couldn't a good translation have done just as well?

It has been very hard to find anything about the life of John Conroy Hutcheson. He was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, in 1840, and died in Portsea, England, in late 1896 or early 1897. This was picked up from the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. He wrote about 18 novels, most, though not all, about the sea.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either on the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk